


Getting into DC Comics

by Anonymous



Series: DC Comics Reference Work [1]
Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Fandom Primer, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:34:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25522195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: It's easier than you think.
Series: DC Comics Reference Work [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1552258
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1
Collections: Anonymous





	Getting into DC Comics

Here's the secret of superhero comics fandom: _nobody knows the entirety of canon._ Not fans, not the official writers (who are just fans with deadlines and paychecks). Canon shifts from month to month, year to year, Crisis to Crisis, some of it intentional reboots and retcons, some of it unintentional divergence that happens because there's no way to know everything or keep track of everything. And some of canon is garbage that doesn't deserve to be kept track of. So there's no minimum reading requirement for being in superhero comics fandom, and there's no requirement for your fanworks to be compliant with all of canon, because you couldn't be even if you wanted to -- and odds are you really don't.

#### 1\. How to get comics

Individual issues, sometimes called floppies, can be bought in comic book shops and ordered from online comic book retailers and eBay. The older an issue is, the more difficult it is going to be to find someone selling it, and older issues can be prohibitively expensive.

Bound collections and graphic novels can be bought in comic book shops and regular bookstores, as well as wherever you buy books online. You may also find them at the library. Collections are generally cheaper to buy than buying each of the collected issues individually.

Digitized comics can be got a number of ways. You can buy them through ComiXology website. Subscription to the DC Universe website (only available in the US) gets you access to the entire digitized portion of DC's back catalogue. You can read the comics on these websites in your browser or in their app. Some libraries have a digital comic borrowing service, that I assume involve their own apps as well. And of course there's always piracy. (For TOS reasons I won't link to any of these sites, but let's just say that if you want to _get comics_ to download, _read comics online_ for free, or torrent them, there are ways to do so.) The formats of downloaded comics are .cbr and .cbz (which are just images packaged in a .rar archive or .zip archive, respectively). You can read these using comic book reader software, or you can just unrar/unzip the archives and open the images in your normal image viewer.

Caveat: due to changes in printing technology and bad choices made in photoshop, reprints and official digitized versions of most comics from the '80s and earlier have weird coloring and sometimes the shading and other fine details have also been mangled. If the art in the reprinted/digitized versions bothers you, you can find unaltered scans of the original issues on pirate sites.

#### 2\. Where to start

Starting with the first issue in a series may seem like the obvious approach. That's often a good starting point, but sometimes it isn't. For the longer running series, the first issue may be hundreds of issues and two reboots away from the stories you actually want to read. Additionally, some first issues are tie-ins to a larger crossover story, and may not make sense on their own.

The easiest way of all to start reading comics is to pick up a trade. Huge swaths of DC comics have been compiled and published in collections (nicknamed TPBs or trades, even though some collections are hardcover), and more are published each year. Trades are easy because the editor has done the work for you of identifying a start/end point to a storyline (or selecting a representative sampler), compiling the relevant issues, and weeded out the overlapping unrelated stories. If you know what you're looking for -- e.g., a specific series, a specific storyline, a certain creator's run on a given title or a character -- using those as search terms is often enough to turn up the collected editions you want. If you're not looking for anything in specific, picking up a random trade is still going to get you something readable.

If you'd like recommendations for a given character or team or relationship, there are hundreds of lists out there. Just google "Superman comics recommendations", "Dick Grayson reading list", "spideytorch comics recs", or whatever else you're interested in, and you'll find them. Or ask the nearest comics fan; everyone's got opinions.

#### 3\. Some tips and resources

\- [A brief rundown of the different eras of DC comics and what the Crises are.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21328444)

\- Sometimes you'll see volume numbers used to differentiate between comic book series with the same title. Beware: nobody agrees on the numbering. Dates are a much more reliable way to disambiguate between series with the same title.

\- Sometimes a series changes title partway through or skips ahead in the issue numbering. E.g., Adventure Comics #12 (2010) is followed by Adventure Comics #516. (This is one of the reasons there's no consensus on volume numbering.)

\- Big crossover events such as Batman: No Man's Land are notoriously annoying to follow issue by issue as they jump from title to title. To simplify them, you can read the trades, you can read in [DC Universe's storyline section](https://www.dcuniverse.com/collections/story-no-mans-land), or you can simply google the event name + "reading order" and you will find [the list of issues](https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Batman%3A_No_Man's_Land#Reading_Order).

\- The biggest two characters, Batman and Superman, are always regulars in 2+ series simultaneously. Sometimes those series have separate ongoing storylines, sometimes this month's Detective Comics story continues from last month's Batman story. Stories that continue in another title usually say which one at the end of the issue. They less reliably tell you which title the previous installment of the story appeared in. Superman comics from the 90s (the "triangle years") ran continuous stories between 3-5 separate titles with a number in a triangle on the cover so you could know which order to read that year's Superman comics in. I don't know who thought this was a good idea, but at least it was well labeled. [DC Universe](https://www.dcuniverse.com/search?q=triangle&filter=collection) has made the triangle years convenient to read, otherwise you just have to check the covers.

\- [The DC wiki](https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/DC_Comics_Database) is a good general source of information on anything DC. Wikipedia is also a surprisingly decent resource.

\- [Mike's Index](http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/index.php) and/or [The Grand Comics Database](https://www.comics.org/) (they're pretty much equivalent when it comes to DC) have indexes of every comic DC ever published. This comes in handy for example, if you've been told to read Batman #416, you can look it up by [issue](http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/features/story.php?storyid=261630), to find out that it's been reprinted in the [Batman: Second Chances](http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/features/guide.php?page=tpb&tpbid=169174) TPB. If you've been recommended "Dixon's Nightwing run", you can look up creator by name, sort by title, and find [Chuck Dixon](http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/features/creator.php?creatorid=202) wrote Nightwing #1-70 (1996-2002).

\- If you want a list of every issue a character appeared in, the best option used to be ComicBookDB, but the site went offline, and all that remains is the increasingly out of date [WayBack Machine version](https://web.archive.org/web/20071011210502/http://comicbookdb.com:80/browse.php?search=Character). The DC wiki and [Comic Vine](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/) list character appearances, but in non-chronological order. Character appearances listing in Mike's Index are an incomplete work in progress.

**Author's Note:**

> Any questions?


End file.
